Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Microsoft to kill off Essential Business Server

CRN mentioned that Microsoft is ending the Essential Business Server product from June 30th this year. EBS hit the streets around the same time as Lotus Foundations was emerging from IBM's acquisition of Nitix. I slammed the product at the time for its hefty hardware requirements while still maintaining a (IIRC) 75 employee user cap for the installation.

I believe there is a great market for a small business server like Lotus Foundations but Microsoft clearly got it wrong with EBS..

EBS was Microsoft's mid-level three-server package. It took Exchange, ISA, and MS SQL, bundled them into one licensing agreement, added some nice management tools (like Remote Web Workplace) and cut the price by quite a bit.

EBS was intended from 50-300 seat clients. The initial version had some rough spots but the second release (that was pretty much ready to release) had, according to testers and early reviewers, resolved most of the issues.

SBS (Small Business Server) is still alive and viable for the forseeable future. That's the up-to-75-user package.